The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  The Deep-Blue Triple-Thick Horror of Teahupoo

  By the end of the 1990s, tow surfing had been exported to Maverick’s, and surfers there were soon catapulting themselves into waves nearly equal in size to those at Jaws—more evidence that big-wave surfing’s future would be motor-driven. At the same time, as familiarity settled in, the corresponding thrill of the whole tow-in enterprise lessened incrementally. The breakthrough from thirty to forty feet had been stunning. Jumping to sixty feet and beyond was merely astounding—and more or less expected.

  The number of ridden twenty-five-foot-plus waves had gone up a hundredfold since 1990, thanks to the multiplying effect of tow surfing. Furthermore, nearly every ride was filmed and photographed and presented in one media form or another. Books were published on Jaws and Maverick’s. Big-wave documentaries arrived by the dozen. The surf mags all ran two or three lengthy big-wave features a year, and the Internet was opening up the sport’s deepest, broadest media stream of all. Attention on the big-wave crazies was almost constant, but no one lingered over the new shots from Jaws, or Mavs, or Waimea the way they used to.

  Also, the constant loop of big-wave imagery begged the question: Just how dangerous is it, anyway? In 1995, a year after Mark Foo died, an unranked California pro named Donnie Soloman died at Waimea, and Todd Chesser, a big-wave vet, drowned at a North Shore outer reef break a year later. Still, the mortality rate for big-wave surfers wasn’t in the same league as those for auto racers, cyclists, skydivers, or mountaineers. The assumption had been that the death count would go up as surfers rode bigger, more powerful waves. It didn’t happen. The fact that each tow surfer had a driver looking out for him, takeoff to kickout, helped a lot. But it wasn’t just that. George Downing, one of Hawaii’s big-wave originals, believed that wave power diminished in proportion to wave size as the surf got bigger. An eight-footer might be twice as powerful as a four-footer, Downing explained, but a fifty-footer was nowhere near double the strength of a twenty-five-footer.

  For whatever reason, tow surfing, by 2000, eight years after it was introduced, was responsible for zero deaths. Maybe it was a statistical anomaly. The number of hardcore big-wave riders was tiny—no more than three hundred—and while more big-wave breaks were in play, the number of suitable riding days at a given break was still fairly small. Or maybe big surf wasn’t as deadly as it looked. The whole thing was an open question.

  Tow surfers, in any event, had thrill options that weren’t available to previous generations of surfers. In 1999, Laird Hamilton became interested in a horror-show break called Teahupoo (pronounced CHO-pu) in Tahiti, and his attraction had much to do with wanting to put himself—and big-wave surfing—in closer proximity to mortal danger.

  Teahupoo is a different kind of wave. The surf gets big, but not like Jaws or Maverick’s. Twenty-five-foot, trough to crest, is about the limit. Volume is what counts at Teahupoo. Five hundred yards past the lineup, the ocean floor is still two thousand feet deep, which means that an incoming swell hits the reef so fast, and so abruptly, that it simply backs up on itself. On a big day, to equalize, the whole upper-third of a wave will blow out in a solid cantilevered mass. The terms “curl” and “lip” can’t do justice to an unloading Teahupoo tube, so surfers began calling this kind of top-heavy break a “slab.”

  Teahupoo was on the map by the early 1990s, and before the decade ended it had replaced Pipeline as the world’s most fearsome left-breaking wave. Unlike Pipeline, a big one at Teahupoo will already be funneling down the reef by the time it hits the lineup. The surfer’s POV at this point is terrifying. “You’re standing on the tracks while the train’s coming full speed,” one world-tour pro said. “And you turn around and jump on.” As the surfer drops in, the wave bends a few degrees around the comma-shaped reef, getting taller, thicker, and hollower. The ride is a tube-race—nothing else. About six seconds after takeoff, the tube expectorates a few thousand gallon’s worth of vaporized water, and if the surfer is still on his feet, he’ll fly out of the misting remnants and quickly exit over the top before the wave disintegrates into a closeout.

  Teahupoo became an ASP world tour venue in 1999, when it was still thought of as strictly a paddle-in break. From the opening heat, it was clear Teahupoo had its own height ceiling. Fifteen-footers here simply jacked up too fast for a traditional paddle-in takeoff. Conditions were perfect, and the world’s best surfers were vying for points, money, and glory. Yet wave after wave rolled through untouched.

  The Millennium Wave

  Laird Hamilton watched video of the Teahupoo event and got a kick out of seeing competitors scamper out of the way of those fifteen-footers. He’d never surfed there, but the wave appealed to him like nothing he’d seen since Jaws. Strapped once again to his huge piece of driftwood, plowing furrows in the beach as he dragged it back and forth, he thought about those bunker-busting Teahupoo tubes. The world-tour pros had just scratched the surface there, he believed. Things could be taken a lot further. The more he thought about it, the more impatient he became. His idea, of course, was to tow surf the place. And not the fifteen-footers he’d seen in the video, but something much bigger.

  Hamilton and a small retinue of photographers and fellow tow surfers arrived at Teahupoo in early August 2000. The stakes had just been raised. A few weeks earlier, a local surfer tried to punch through a twelve-foot wave and was pulled over the falls and pile-driven into the reef. He died of massive head injuries.

  At sunrise, on August 17, Hamilton was in the Teahupoo channel staring into waves that looked to be half-again larger than anything yet ridden there—although it was hard to tell from his angle. The sun was out, the air was completely still, and the water was mirror-smooth. Hamilton and his driver motored out to the lineup. Veteran filmmaker Jack McCoy sat on the back of a two-seat PWC with a camera resting on his lap and watched a wave “unload on the reef unlike anything I’d ever seen . . . a low-tide monster that drained out as if somebody had pulled a bathtub plug.”

  Hamilton opened with two or three warm-up rides, nothing fancy. He fell on a midsized wave and was lightly rolled across the reef. Just before noon he tracked too high on a triple-overhead set wave and was nearly pitched over the falls; he leaned back to fully extended his front leg, bracing the top of his foot against the strap until his toes and instep were completely lifted off the board, and was able to correct his line. Both his ankles began to swell from the strain.

  “I WAS GOING A THOUSAND MILES AN HOUR BUT GETTING NOWHERE. I WENT TO THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE. I MAY NOT EVER COME DOWN COMPLETELY FROM THAT EXPERIENCE.”

  —Laird Hamilton

  The monster Hamilton caught less than five minutes later was bigger than anything he’d ridden all morning. This was the one. Incredibly, he launched from fifty yards farther up the reef, and to make up the distance he began angling hard for the channel from the moment he dropped the rope. The wave dilated as it squared up to the reef, and Hamilton was shadowed as the thing wound itself into a huge, blue, satin-finish death-spiral of a tube. He rode just a few feet above the trough. Above his head was another twelve feet of open face; above that was a ten-foot-thick domed ceiling of water. Hamilton’s line this time was perfect. He shot himself like a cannonball through the tube, vanished as the tube expelled a weather system of pressurized water, then reappeared and flew across the wave’s back slope. Dazed and breathing heavily as he joined McCoy and the others in the channel, he dropped his head and began to cry.

  On the Slab

  Surfer called it the “Millennium Wave”—because it happened in 2000, and to emphasize that this was the single most dramatic moment in the sport’s history to that point—and it put another mile or two of distance between Hamilton and every other big-wave rider. More tow surfers would soon come to Teahupoo and ride waves just as big and thick. But Hamilton got there first, as usual. “There’s so much emotion in that moment,” he said a few days later, looking at video footage of the ride and his teary response in the channel afterward
. “A lifetime of desires, a lifetime of dreams, of work, of hope—all this stuff got to me in this one moment. I blinked and it was over.”

  The Millennium Wave also helped turn slab-riding into a kind of surfing freak show. The old-fashioned Himalayan challenge to ride the world’s tallest waves—that remained. A bizarre open-ocean surf spot called Cortes Bank, six hours from San Diego by boat, was now on everybody’s radar as the break most likely to produce a rideable hundred-foot wave. But slab waves warped the sport into something different, and Teahupoo was just the introduction—as well as the exception, being smooth and fairly predictable. A dozen or more soon-to-be publicized slabs—including Shipstern Bluff in Tasmania, Shark Park in Central California, Cyclops in Western Australia, and Ours in Sydney—all produced a kind of mashed-up wave that looked like nothing so much as a two-story piece of Frank Gehry architecture. Most had two or three steps in the face. There were multiple curl lines, some running on a bias. All were incredibly shallow and powerful.

  Slabs were occasionally paddle-surfed. “Ledge” waves—scaled-down versions of the slab—had in fact been ridden for decades. (Bodyboarders pioneered a lot of slab breaks; swim-fins gave them a fast start during takeoff, and their small, soft, prone-ridden craft was a huge advantage on a fast-jacking drop.) Most slabs, though, were regarded as tow-in breaks. Tow or paddle, a surfer rarely dropped down the face with the intention of doing anything but running himself spear-like through the wave’s guts. In that respect, the slab was a throwback to big-wave riding in its original form: surfing as pure survival.

  There was a fundamental difference, however. Big-wave pioneer Rick Grigg had once described what it was like to sit in the lineup at Waimea or Makaha. “You’d be out there just scared to death—but also completely knocked out by the beauty of it all.” Slabs were ugly. Places like Shipstern and Ours, as one surf writer put it, were “so malformed they hardly deserve a name.”

  While the vast majority of surfers wanted nothing to do with slabs, these breaks provided an unbeatable form of surf-voyeurism. There was certainly an appreciation among viewers for the technique and finesse required to get from one end of a reef-gouging twelve-footer to the other. But slab appeal was mostly rooted in visceral fear and Roman Coliseum–like blood-and-guts spectacle. At some level, this wasn’t any different than what had compelled hundreds of bystanders to gather, thrilled and half-terrified, on that first day at Waimea in 1957, when Greg Noll and company seemingly cheated death with each ride and each wipeout. Yet the emphasis changed. The majesty was toned down and replaced by a kind of snuff-film ugliness. Never before had the sport looked so exhilarating. Never had it been so unfamiliar to itself.

  Catching the Digital Wave

  Laird Hamilton’s Millennium Wave was the first real test of surfing’s Digital Age preparedness. Less than forty-eight hours after the event, photos of the ride, converted to low-res files, were attached to emails and sent to a handful of surf magazine editors. Within three or four days the images had landed in every surf-industry hard drive from Torquay to Tokyo. Since all identifying notes and remarks had been removed from the digital image at some early point in the distribution chain, the photos turned up on most computer screens unadorned; lots of recipients thought the whole thing was a well-crafted Photoshop hoax.

  A week later, Surfer won a bidding war for a video clip of Hamilton’s ride, which was immediately posted on its Web site. By the time Surfer ran the Millennium Wave as a gatefold cover on the February 2001 issue, tens of thousands of surf-world Internet gawkers had already given themselves a headache from repeatedly watching a small, fuzzy, color-drained version on their PCs.

  Surfers weren’t Digital Age early adopters, exactly, but they were ahead of the curve compared to other athletes. Their incessant demand for surf media outpaced what magazines and videos could supply, and that had a lot to do with it. All by itself, having a new outlet for pictures, video clips, and stories pulled a lot of surfers into cyberspace. The real driving force, though, was the medium’s suitability for wave reports and forecasting. Here, the Internet did more than replicate its surf media predecessors. Within a few years, virtually everything having to do with surf reports and forecasting had shifted to the Web. It was a perfectly inverted match for tow surfing—nerd-driven, passive, and useful to nearly every surfer on the planet.

  In 1994, a San Diego County bodysurfer/hacker named Ron Britvich wrote a software program that automatically, six times an hour, uploaded a ten-second video snippet from a camera set up at a friend’s beachfront house in Carlsbad. The clips were posted on Britvich’s Web site, called Surf Net. Through Surf Net, the user could also link to the National Weather Service and other relevant swell- and weather-related sites, which would slowly fill your computer screen with small-print columns of raw meteorological data—each page dense enough to send all but the most numbers-hardened surfer rushing back to the latest ten-second upload from Carlsbad. There was a teasing quality to the video clips. Ten seconds could easily pass without a single wave breaking. But it was a start.

  SHIPSTERN BLUFF, TASMANIA, 2007.

  Surfer had recently established its own dot-com beachhead, and in late 1994 the magazine published its first article about the Internet. By “webbing” from site to site, Surfer revealed, it might soon be possible to “instantly tap a live video feed [from] Kirra or Jeffreys Bay or Pipeline or Rincon.” Surfers would also be able to view computer-generated forecasting maps that would let them know days ahead of time where and when the surf would arrive. It all sounded “a little far-fetched,” the magazine admitted. But readers were advised that “for the cost of a personal computer and [an Internet fee of] about $20 a month, you can already have a taste of these incredible possibilities.”

  Surfline, the popular Huntington-based wave report and forecasting service, went online in 1995, but originally the site was nothing more than a modem-channeled version of its 800-phone service. Things picked up two years later, when Surfline and a few other similar companies put up the first around-the-clock live-stream “surf cams.” Predictably, the surf-report wars from the 1980s flared back up. Critics mostly recycled old arguments—the new technology added to the crowds and made for a lazy surf-citizenry—and in a few places cameras were stolen or vandalized. The cameras were legal, aimed across public beaches toward public lineups, but to many surfers, even to those not generally sympathetic to vandalism, these new computer-streamed portholes felt like an intrusion. These were the same kind of cameras used in banks, prisons, and 7-Elevens—it was depressing to see them on the beach. More than that, it was another sign that wave-riding was being taken out of the wild and further domesticated.

  Then again, how could you not look? One mouse click, and there was a live shot of Pipeline, or Malibu, or Bondi Beach. For a long time after cameras were introduced, the ability look at waves up and down the coast, across the continent, across entire oceans, felt like something very close to teleportation. Everybody, critics included, knew that the cams were going to be a smash hit. And the attraction just grew with every program upgrade, every delivery-speed improvement, and each new generation of computers. It didn’t take long for this new media source to go from novel to essential. By the early 2000s, online cameras and reports were a universal part of the surfing world.

  TAYLOR STEELE (RIGHT), EDITING A 1995 VIDEO WITH KELLY SLATER.

  * * *

  Surfing got caught up in the same late-turn-of-the-century dot-com boom that swept across the United States at large. Swell, Hardcloud, and Bluetorch, three California-based surfing megasites, together burned through more than $50 million in venture capital in 1999 and 2000. They raided surf magazine staffs, peeling off editors, designers, photographers, and management from both Surfer and Surfing. They sponsored pro tour contests, developed boardsport spinoff sites, and bought a number of existing businesses, including Surfline. Each Web site hoped to become a “category killer.” Beyond that, nobody had much of a business plan.

  All three
sites were bright and flashy and layered with “content,” some of which was appropriate to the medium—live contest feeds, user forums, breaking news—but most of which was trivial and/or redundant to what was being published in the magazines. Plus, if you didn’t have the very latest hardware and software and a fast connection, the sites didn’t work properly.

  “This is a medium that’s still evolving,” a Hardcloud official admitted, not long after the site launched. “Nobody really knows where this is going.” The Big Three surf sites quickly found out. Onscreen ad space went unpurchased, customers browsed the affiliated “e-tail” stores but didn’t buy, and most pay-to-play features were ignored. All those dreamed-about six-figure stock offerings vanished into the ether. The surf sites weren’t alone in this, and they joined the broader dotcom meltdown. Hardcloud and Bluetorch went bust during a two-week stretch in fall of 2000. Eight months later, Swell gave nearly its entire site to Surfline. In their original form, none of the Big Three lasted more than a year.

  Still, when the smoke cleared, little damage was done to any sector of the surf business. The millions of cinderized dotcom startup dollars had all come from outside investors, and while the surf industry went through a small downturn, along with the global economy, the Third Boom was reengaged by the end of 2003.

  Meanwhile, tens of thousands of surfers were now comfortable going online, and what was left after the shakeout was a new and much improved network of surf report and forecast services. Surfline was the big winner. In the early going, when venture capital was raining down by the bagful, nobody in the sport made better use of their good fortune than Surfline, as the company plowed it all back into better surf cams, improved data gathering and processing, and new graphics. CEO Sean Collins improved his position as the great wave-predicting oracle: he was the “Alan Greenspan of surfing,” according to Surfer, who ranked him as the sport’s eighth-most powerful figure in 2002, one slot ahead of Roxy CEO Randy Hild. Surfline had a small overhead, an in-demand product, and a loyal user base—500,000 visitors per month, as of 2002. It quickly became surfing’s model of online profitability, selling ads and charging a “premium membership” fee.